


The girl who ran so fast

by canyouseemyspark



Series: Dorne [5]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Character Death, Domestic Violence, F/M, Fic Exchange, Future Fic, POV Female Character, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 02:54:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/605022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canyouseemyspark/pseuds/canyouseemyspark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.” - Catherynne M. Valente</p>
            </blockquote>





	The girl who ran so fast

**Author's Note:**

> Response to [got-exchange](http://got-exchange.livejournal.com) prompt: Myrcella Baratheon, warrior queen

_Cold, rain, and emptiness as far as the eye could go, bearded men who smelled like something old and women with their hair down to their waists, hair like a cloak. Frightening but beautiful too, a place you could never belong to unless you were born there, unless you fought against it everyday and survived only to wake and begin all over again. Those were the things Myrcella remembered of her time at Winterfell. It seemed like a dream even when she was there, and with the passage of time, she began to doubt whether it happened at all._

_Tommen too, she remembered him. It had been so cold on the first day, they lay in her bed beneath the furs, their cloaks and riding boots still on, shivering and laughing. He turned towards her then, the little lamb, and smiled._

_“I’m glad I’ll never be king,” He whispered, “Joff doesn’t get to play anymore, he has to stay out there with the Starks all day while we’re in here, cozy.” He hugged the furs closer to himself, grinning._

_“You’d be a good king,” She remembered herself saying, reaching out and grabbing his red nose, sending him into giggles._

_“No, I wouldn’t!” He laughed, in the easy, free way children do. “You’d make a better queen, Cella.”_

_Myrcella rolled on her back and stared at the ceiling, dark, old stone that her father said was full of the warmest, sweetest water._

_“I can't be a queen, I'm only a girl.”_

* * *

There were nights when she held her hand over an open flame, gritting her teeth, wincing, and finally pulling away when the pain became unbearable. Perhaps if she practiced, she might grow to tolerate it and then the fire of dragons engulfing her, snaking in between her fingers, through her clothes, would not be so terrible.

For that was likely her fate. Myrcella had felt it stir inside her when she first heard of Quentyn’s death, her betrothed’s brother ravaged by the dragons of the so-called Targaryen queen. She wondered if he was handsome like Trystane, if he screamed or begged. Or maybe, just gave up.

The news drifted in more slowly after that, and the guards around her chamber and the maids in her rooms changed daily so she did not recognize any faces around her. She did not recognize her own either, now that the wound had healed and she was left with the outline of the bite of the blade, red and horrible. They explained to her that it was for her own good, that she was an honored guest and in these uncertain times one could never be too safe, but the scent of the blood oranges and the hot wind on her skin and Trystane’s arms and his lips were the bars of her dungeon.

He was the sweetest boy, so kind he reminded her of Tommen. Pleased to spend his days with his feet in the sand, casting his line into the Greenblood, twisting the thick leaves of the trees into bracelets and rings. A good-natured sort of sloth. He had known then that Arianne would rule, and if she did not then Quentyn would, but it would never be him. He would be given some holdfast in the Marshes and a maester to run it. Not much would change, so he did not have to either. There was no need for anger then, or sadness. Life is to be enjoyed, he would tell her, and smile and laugh.

Myrcella had thought to speak with him, tell her of the fate she feared, but he had never known grief, never known horror. So much the boy still, when she felt like an old woman, death breathing down her neck. It might have been easier in those dark days to resign herself to her fate, to embrace the terror so she could at least sleep, eat, pray at the sept without looking at those solemn faces and wanting to scream. But inside her, her mother and father and uncles and grandfather all raged inside her, lions and stags, beautiful and horrible and dangerous, blood, horns, and gold, roaring and screeching, refusing to yield.

* * *

She would be a warrior, like her father. Warriors planned, weighed the costs of their decisions, studied their enemies. She pictured him in his glory, fierce and black-haired with his war hammer in his hand, a silver prince drowning in blood at his feet. Hunting him, luring him, and finally – the attack. Magnificent and deadly. Brutal.

Her mother too was a hunter, Myrcella understood that now. Born a Lannister and raised up to be a Baratheon and a queen, a litter of princesses and princes and kings springing from her loins. She survived King’s Landing, even tamed it for a while, the only place in all Seven Kingdoms more infested with snakes than Dorne itself. Perhaps she had been a young girl too, trapped in a different sort of cage, stalking a different sort of prey.

Both had destroyed prey, eviscerated their names. They allowed others to linger on in pain, brought them closer and licked their wounds for them, saving them for a later meal. Ned Stark, she remembered when she was at Winterfell, only smiled for his daughters and his lady. In the North, he was a sliver of the memory of a beloved to her father. In the South, he was a threat, put out of his misery by her mother. There was Uncle Jamie too, her mother’s pet, who she let believe was a member of the pack and Uncle Tyrion who never was, but who tried so hard to be and that was enough to bind him. Lords and ladies, jousting and dancing and preening and plotting, some whose deaths complicated matters, other who served a higher purpose in living.The choice was essential.

Both her parents were brought to their knees by their own folly, by pride and malice and a yearning for things past. Myrcella had been humbled, Gerold Dayne’s blade had made sure of that. There was no hate within her, not for her captors who named themselves protectors; she knew that their blood had been helpless once too and lions had devoured them and relished in their kill. No nostalgia lingered in her heart – she knew in her future lay victory.

* * *

_Her mother was brushing her hair, her fingers shaking, undoing the old knots and forming new ones, braiding and unbraiding, picking ribbons, dreading. Myrcella was to leave for Dorne that morning, and she was trying to memorize the smell of her mother, the drop of her shoulders, the silent weight in her chest. She thought of her mother’s hands in her hair and cried._

_“You’ll make a beautiful bride one day,” Her mother said, resting her head on her daughter’s shoulder, breathing out, breathing in, giving her the final and most important lesson._

_“Men will crumble at your feet, and those who do not, you must make kneel.”_

_Perhaps even then, Myrcella knew her first victim would be her lover._

* * *

 Fate cast its own dice.

Her moon blood came on a day so hot that even the birds which sang outside her window each day seemed to have abandoned Dorne, their songs silenced, gone to find some cool respite in a faraway land. She woke to a bed full of blood and a pain which racked her body in waves, receding for a moment only to return, more violent than before. Rosamund helped her clean the mess, both of them childishly stuffing the soiled silks beneath the featherbed, ripping out the entrails of one of Rosamund’s hats and using the cotton as a shield between Myrcella’s bleeding loins and her smallclothes. All the while poor Rosamund, who came to Dorne a smiling girl who blushed whenever a Dornish lord spoke to her, and who now walked every step as though she was heading to the gallows, holding back tears. A solemn ritual of womanhood.

It was too soon, Myrcella thought, panicked. Her moon blood might have meant her marriage had Quentyn, Joffrey, Oberyn not died. Now it would be a reminder to the Dornish of a promise they could not, would not, see through. Now it would be a chance to send her back to King’s Landing, back into the hands of a realm that was consuming itself from the inside, picking at a rotting and festering wound. Maybe some worse fate, too frightening to imagine.

And yet, there was a poetry even in death. New life arrived in Myrcella’s chambers at the Water Gardens, a door to a long-hidden secret had opened, an initiation. And meanwhile a door was locked shut and a different ceremony began as the Silent Sisters cast their shadow into the sunlight halls of Sunspear and prepared the body of a prince. Dead of illness or grief, or called to the grave by the voices of those he loved most, a sister and a brother and a son, Myrcella did not know. Prince Doran was gone and Trystane was suddenly there, a weeping figure standing at the edge of her bed, the boy who played cyvasse with her and kissed her in the orange grove, robbed of a brother, a mother, a father, the man who began to forget her once his shoulders grew broader and the smiles of beautiful women more plentiful, broken. In that moment, she believed the gods were good. They helped deliver her prey to the edge of the water. All she had to do was pick the moment to strike.

* * *

_A slap, a howl, screeches, scratches, curses hurled. Myrcella’s maids had wrapped her up in silks and bows, even allowed her to wear powder on her cheeks for the first time. She was outside the king’s solar, sitting in a chair too big for her, surrounded by knights in white, swinging her feet and waited. Outside was a tourney in honor of Joffrey’s nameday, and her father promised to let her sit beside him. Her mother went in before her to ask if Joffrey would be allowed to joust, and within moments the sound of her hushed request coming through the door had devolved into a fierce argument._

_Her father only ever hurt her once. Myrcella was still young then, had not known the proper way to do things, to survive. She got in between them when he was arguing with her mother. With one slap of his hand, he sent Myrcella flying across the room, her ears ringing, the shock of it all a deterrent against any cries that threatened to rise from her throat. Afterwards, he brought her a doll to show he was sad about it too. And she learned to ignore it._

_She fidgeted with her dress as the shrieks grew louder, suddenly felt as though she might cry. She did not want to be late to the tourney after all, wanted to show everyone her new dress and eat strawberry tarts with Tommen, watch all the handsome knights and see the pretty ladies with flowers in their hair. Her mother was suddenly quiet and now all she could hear was her father’s shouts. For a horrified moment, she wondered what it might be like not to have a mother. The tears came before she could stop them, and all of a sudden she felt cold scales on her face as she was lifted from the seat, around her a pair of gold-plated arms._

_She looked up and into her uncle’s bright green eyes, a mirror image of her own, though his were sadder. She wondered if he might cry too, then remembered the knights were supposed to be brave._

_Her father wasn’t a knight._

_“I don’t want to go to the tourney anymore,” She wept, reaching up to touch his lion’s-head helm, running her fingers up and down the sharp little teeth._

_“Of course you do,” He murmured. “Some handsome young knight might ask you for your favor, you don’t want to keep him waiting, do you?”_

_“I won't ever be married,” She replied, resting her head on the cold surface of his armor, her hair thrown over his shoulder, their golden manes melded together, indistinguishable._

_He scoffed, “You won’t be saying that in a few years, I can promise you.”_

_“If I marry, I’ll choose a knight. Someone like you, uncle Jaime."_

_His breathing stilled and his voice changed, became something darker, stranger._

_“Warriors and knights in their youth become drunken lechers in old age,” He whispered, “Pray for a fool, a kind fool.”_

_He smelled of lemons, of her mother. She hugged him closer._

* * *

In the end, Myrcella chose to hunt by night.

Trystane brought her with him to Sunspear, taking the seat which had belonged to his father, the seat which belonged to his sister far away on a journey no one spoke of. The burden was heavy, she convinced him, the gods had been cruel to rob him of his youth, his father, she crooned, but she understood, this orphan in all but name, with a faraway mother, a dead father, a murdered brother too. His smiles died along with Prince Doran, the boy who spent his days pulling giggling servant girls into his bed now a lonesome figure, ruling with soft phrases, mild manners, gloom hung around him like a dark shroud. She silenced the part of herself that reveled in being the object of his attention once more, though their games no longer took place across a cyvasse board but over a featherbed.

With the sunset, he was no longer the prince but was once again the boy, reaching out to her with greedy hands, pouting, weeping. She learned to touch him, to forget all she had been taught of chastity. It frightened her to bare herself to him at first, exposing all, feeling his soft hands on her breasts, her thighs, so different from kisses exchanged in a haze of childish embarrassment. Over time she found a power in it too, a strength within her, fire between skin when she took him in her hands, in her mouth, wiped his seed from her fingers and watched him stiffen and thrust and moan, then pull her close and bury his face in her chest.

He slid the noose around his own neck at the end.

He pulled away too late, spilling inside her for the first time. Afterwards he placed his hand on her stomach, as though to embrace a child who would someday grow in her womb. Their child.

“I love you, Myrcella."

Only a few words. The trap was set, the prey caught. She smiled.

* * *

It was only a matter of time after that. Joffrey, her father, Doran, Quentyn, Oberyn, Martells, Lannisters, Baratheons, all calling for others to join them in death. A threat rising in the North and a boy who claimed himself to be king taking Arianne as his queen and an army of sellswords blowing their horns at the gates of King's Landing. Dragons ravaging the Eastern coast, rumors of a yellow-haired dwarf whispering council into the ears of the Targaryen girl. She had denounced the self-crowned King Aegon as a pretender to the throne, a ruse, and the Tyrells waited with bated breath to see which dragon would come to consume the other. And Tommen, dead in his crypt, his body soiled with sweetsleep. Her mother gone too, found strangled in her bed, her throat crushed by something more deadly than a mere human hand.

Fear reigned. Rumors of famine across Westeros trickled in, corpses of women and children lining the streets, crushed by the blood-stained boots of warriors, knights, vagabonds, rapers. Myrcella became a Martell in the crowded sept of Sunspear, the lords and ladies speaking in hushes tones of the rumored babe in stomach, listening as she took her vows, watching as the Lannister cloak dropped from her shoulders.

In the midst of war, the Dornish were feasting on fresh bread, roasted meat, honeyed duck and lemonsweet. The coffers of Casterly Rock were open to Myrcella as the Lannister heir, and she facilitated the stream of gold from the Westerlands into Dorne. She won the hearts of the people by filling their bellies. She won the nobles over by gold and threats and promises, secrets kept and alliances formed. And when Daenerys Targaryen's dragons burned down King's Landing, leaving the corpses of her nephew and his bride among the charred ruins of the city, Trystane became the Prince of Dorne. When Sansa Stark appeared in the North proclaiming herself Queen in the North, followed by Mace Tyrell in the Reach, and Shireen Baratheon in the Stormlands, Myrcella found herself crowned once more. Queen of Dorne. A throne made by blood and gold, intrigues, bastards, a useful match, her father's daughter after all. A Lannister, a Baratheon, and a Martell all in one. Alive.


End file.
